Category Archives: Urban Fantasy

It had been born in a chance encounter between fork lightning and a hillock already gravid with the old magics. Now all the changeling had to do was survive until adulthood, but that was easier said than done. A family had to be found – and fast.

Hovering outside a ground floor flat on Edinburgh’s Marchmont Road that it had been watching for weeks, it sensed the sleeping occupants – a young couple, Babs and Ricky Robertson and their two month old baby Ryan.

The perfect match.

Babs, a nurse at the Royal Edinburgh, was on maternity leave, struggling with the demands of a new-born baby. Ricky, a freelance graphic designer with too much time on his hands, busied himself with getting under her feet and huffing that he was no longer the sole focus of her attentions.

Neither of them had the slightest inkling that they had caught the attention of a malign being bent on replacing Ryan with itself, forcing them to care for it. It would be identical to their lost son down to the last eyelash – but the real Ryan would be dead, his body reduced to shadow and cobwebs. They would be too once the changeling reached maturity – a bloody rite of passage that was the hallmark of its kind.

A shadow without substance or form, it passed through the wall of Ryan’s bedroom. The baby slept on, unaware of his danger, dark lashes fanned out on each plump cheek, the blond wisps of his hair glimmering in the faint light from the hall.

Oh, how Babs and Ricky would wonder what had happened to their placid baby boy as time passed. Why was their precious little bundle of joy so cruel and vindictive, lashing out when anyone got too close? And why did the family pets keep disappearing without trace? Later still, his teachers would huddle in groups in the common room whispering about the incomprehensible horrors contained in his latest essay and what a troubled child he was. Endless referrals to an army of psychiatrists would reveal nothing but how the harassed, desperate parents were somehow to blame.

Somehow the changeling knew all of this, as though it had been imprinted on what passed for its soul. All it had to do was take that first, irrevocable step…

It drifted down onto the child’s face and still Ryan slept on. He would live until the replication process was complete, some time before Babs and Jamie woke to their new life and child.

The client hadn’t told me much, except that something inhuman had taken up residence in the attic of her holiday home and was scaring the straights. I was only too happy to take the job, swapping the febrile demands of the Edinburgh festive season, for the still, frozen solitude of the country.

The car had been loaded with needful things: clothes, Scooby snacks, a crate of Laphroaig and, last and least, the tools of my trade – two of my best obsidian scrying glasses and a ouija board. You needed all the help you could get when you played down among the dead men.

If things did go tits up, I had a small handgun with a mix of silver and iron bullets. I’d rarely used it though, because although iron and silver slowed supernatural critters down, it hardly ever killed them. And if, by any chance, the beastie hadn’t wanted to kill you before you drilled a hole in it, you would definitely be number one on its bloody, drag-you-to-hell, screaming hit-list afterwards.

All of which meant you only really had your wits to rely on and mine didn’t stretch as far as they used to.

As I drove, the sun finally managed to prise itself clear of the horizon, revealing a clear, crisp winter’s day. A vicious frost last night had tarted up the landscape with a sheen of glimmering silver and the stubborn remnants of a creeping mist softened the stark lines of skeletal trees.

As I drove north over the Forth Road Bridge and into Fife, I switched on the radio, catching some horrendous boy band murdering an old song, aided and abetted by its elderly creator who had a penchant for violating his own work. Feeling a rant coming on, I turned the hellish cacophony off and stuck on a compilation. Placebo kicked off my one woman party with Every Me and Every You and by the time I got to Snapper’s Dumping You, I was singing along like a loon at the top of my voice, drumming my hands on the wheel.

A couple of hours later, hoarse and famished, I stopped off in Inverurie at the Manky Minx pub, devouring a massive lard-ridden fry up washed down with gallons of stewed tea. In the dim, dingy interior, a small collection of punters went about the serious, mostly silent, business of getting as pissed as possible before having to go back to whatever waited at home.

I resumed the journey on a seemingly endless, winding road that was supposed to take me to Midnight Falls. It coiled, like a serpent around the banks of a Loch with a surface as smooth and dark as one of my scrying glasses. There were always local stories about such bodies of water – drowned villages where church bells could be heard tolling on quiet nights when the moon was full. Or others about luckless victims, killed by the untender mercies of loved ones and laid to restless sleep within the glacial depths, only to return for a satisfyingly hideous and brutal showdown.

Jagged, snow covered peaks closed in as my car laboured through the narrow, tricksy mountain passes. The sky darkened and a driving sleet came out of nowhere, obscuring the windscreen in seconds. The wild beauty of these lonely places always appealed, but living here permanently had its own challenges. During the few wan, stillborn months of summer, this part of the country bowed before its insect conquerors and became a biting, buzzing, stinging hell. Alleviated by the deep freeze of winter, the only downside was that you got snowed in and had to eat your own kin to stay alive. Okay, maybe not, but a girl could dream, couldn’t she?

Heavy clouds besieged the sky and I was still in the middle of a vast nowhere. Sleet turned to heavy rain and my flat out wipers only made things worse, the world beyond now a blur of dark grey and sepia. The grunt and thrust of Snapper’s I’ll Stand By Your Man started up from my mobile on the passenger seat – probably the ball-breaking client, Lucille Harper-Hodge, checking where I was.

The road was now a one track affair, thankfully deserted. Keeping the headlights on full beam I spotted a tiny, partially obscured sign pointing to the right. On impulse, I stopped the car, got out into the howling storm and brushed the snow off the sign, finally making out the words, Midnight Falls. You’d think the inhabitants of the village didn’t want to be found – maybe this was going to turn out to be my kind of town after all. I swung the car to the right and travelled down what was little more than a dirt track, overhung with a tunnel of huge trees, spectral in a perpetual dusk of their own creation which leeched most of the remaining light from the day even though it was only just after lunch.

Once free of the trees it brightened a little as I drove up a steep hill, the gradient so extreme, the car was struggling even in seond gear. When I eventually reached the top, I discovered Midnight Falls laid out beneath me, like a dark canker on the coast, caught between the turbulent Irish Sea on one side and impenetrable mountains on the other. What manner of man or beast made their home in such an isolated, Godforsaken spot?

The thing clinging to the living-room ceiling winked at me and, wiggling its little backside, vented the contents of its bowels on the corpse in the half-open casket beneath. It giggled, a high girlish sound and scuttled to the corner of the room where it hung upside down, watching me and rubbing its six fingered hands over vestigial ears like a monstrous, mutated bat.

Not paying it any attention, I picked my way through the wrecked furniture, moved aside the teetering piles of clothes on the hitherto untouched fake leather sofa, and sat down. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes, the creature began to creep back towards the centre of the room and the dead body. Posing for a moment like a prize diver showing off a new move, it dropped down onto the open portion of the casket where it began to dry hump the stiff with more vigour than skill. While I certainly knew that feeling well enough, I also knew something the creature did not: that in life as in showbiz, timing was everything.

Beyond the window, night smothered the remaining light. Not a difficult task given this was the desiccated heart of winter with its perpetual dark only ever leavened by shades of grey.
I had already broken my own rule of not getting caught after sundown here in Gilmerton, a village only just within city limits that didn’t have any other boundaries which dared apply. Perhaps that was why, in true old fashioned pioneer spirit, the hardy soul that had survived here for the past two years only thought he had a poltergeist to deal with. I couldn’t wait to tell him that it was so much worse than something that just wanted to throw a few pots and pans around.

A phlegmy chuckle was muffled by whatever the thing was doing to the corpse, a woman of indeterminate age – although given the part of town I was in she could easily have been anything under thirty. Isa Simpson had been a big woman, someone the quacks would have classified as morbidly obese. The collapsed lower third of her face and missing lips indicated an absence of teeth and grey, straggling hair struggled to make it to her shoulders. Her distraught brother Alec Simpson had told me that the whole sorry business had begun last week when she’d died of a heart-attack. Furniture had been thrown including plates and cutlery, some of which had struck their two little nephews glancing blows and injured the dog. Worst of all, no one could get near the body to take it for burial due to the hail of missiles which had ensued when they’d tried.

A feral growling reminded me why I was here. Crossing the room, I took the scrying glass out of my pocket and, ignoring the humper, positioned the obsidian surface to reflect the corpse’s face. Scrying glasses, if you made them properly and had the eyes to see, showed not just the surface of things, but also any lurking behemoths awaiting the chance to break through.

And there it was: reflected in the polished glass was a fluttering of eyelids that should have been well beyond that type of tease. I edged forward to get a better look, making sure I didn’t touch the monstrous little bastard – time enough for that later. I moved the glass closer and the creature paused in its labours for a few seconds, before whipping round to goggle at me in exaggerated horror, its jaw dislocating itself and stretching all the way down to its bony knees, like a Looney Tunes cartoon. But there was nothing funny about that vast maw, flipped open to reveal countless layers of jagged, yellow teeth. The skin was black and lustrous like a seal, broken by protruding outcrops of malformed bone jutting out all over the head. It was as though it couldn’t decide what species of creature it had wanted to be and had tried out several, not liking any of them enough to evolve one way or the other. It stared at me out of the sewn up slits where its eyes should have been, tiny ticks of movement underneath, like pupae trying to hatch. The arms and legs were elongated with too many joints like a spider without any of its good points. I was sure of one thing: it was dead and it had stayed here for a very good reason.

Through the scrying-glass the news was dark indeed: a spectral face thrashed behind the dead flesh mask, mouth agape, like a negative of an old film with the sound turned down. A chunk of what had been the sideboard flew towards me and I ducked, missing a nasty concussion. We had been doing this dance for a good hour now and after my discovery with the scrying glass, I had to admit with a bitter, sinking heart, that we were going to be doing it a whole lot longer.
The creature laughed…..

The dead hung around her in spectral filaments like old lace on the wedding dress that Miss Havisham would have killed for. The shade of a young girl, more solid than most of the others, turned a face towards me that was smooth and devoid of features apart from two cross shaped scars where her eyes should have been.
’Tea Ms Garnett? ’ smiled my hostess giving me the benefit of her own honey brown peepers.
‘No, but I’ll have some whisky if you’ve got it Lucille,’ I said staring at the ghosts covering her.
The practiced smile slipped a little, whether at the request or the use of her first name, I couldn’t tell.
‘Yes…yes of course. You don’t mind if I don’t join you, do you? Nine in the morning is a tad early for me.’
‘In that case I’ll have yours, so make mine a double,’ I said, grinning. Nothing cheered me up like a spot of narking the clients and I had a feeling this one was going to be a riot.
‘So,’ I said settling into the uncomfortable cream leather couch and taking in the large chrome and glass living-room, ‘What can I do you for?’
She crossed the room and poured me a drink from a sparkling crystal decanter snatched from the drinks cabinet. An oblong of spring sunlight spilled into the room through the huge bay window and across my hostess, or perhaps ghostess would have been more apt, elevating her hair from red to fiery shades of copper and obliterating her trailing ghost-train.
The sounds of birdsong from the garden and the amber liquid sloshing into the shot glass momentarily calmed the white noise in my head. She handed me the drink with a sour grace and I glugged it down, holding my glass out for more and waggling it around for maximum irritation value.
‘Really, Ms Garnett-’
‘Call me Rose.’
‘Very well. Rose. You make it sound like you’re offering a plumbing service. And and I’d just like to remind you that this is not a public house.’
‘Dealing with other people’s shit is what I do, so it’s not a bad analogy. Anyway barkeep, after you’ve gotten me another li’l drinkie, you can tell me why the hell you’ve asked me here. I’ve got a fun-packed day ahead so we really do need to get down to it.’
The shade with the cross scarred eyes shook her head and placed an elongated spectral finger to non-existent lips.
‘What?’ I asked the wraith.
‘I didn’t say anything,’ said Lucille. ‘I should warn you that I’ll be making a complaint to your superiors about your behaviour today. It’s highly unprofessional, not to mention downright rude and frankly I think you have an alcohol problem.’
‘I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to one of the ghosts that’s clinging to you for dear life. Or should that be death? Anyway,’ I said putting a finger up to forestall interruption. ‘First off I don’t have any superiors. I’m my own boss so complaint duly noted and rest assured my fuck you response is in the post. Second I’m the only ‘professional’ in a city of bungling amateurs and I’m more than happy to leave you to their tender mercies, ‘cos frankly babes I don’t need either the work or the additional drama. And third, the only problem I have with alcohol is when I don’t bloody have any.’
I set the empty glass down on the ornate coffee table and got up.
‘Let’s not be so hasty shall we? Here, let me get you that drink,’ she said grabbing my glass and racing over to the drinks cabinet.
What sort of twisted individual had a drinks cabinet? Any booze that made it over my threshold was drained dry immediately. Perhaps more to the point, what sort of weirdo had her own personal ghost riders?
‘Look,’ she said, biting a lipsticked lower lip and handing me a heroic measure of whisky, ‘we’ve obviously got off on the wrong foot. I’m sorry if I’m a bit, well, abrupt, but I’ve been worried sick.’
Being a contrary sort, I accepted the glass first and then considered the apology.
‘Now, about this, er, ghost’ she continued. ‘What do you mean by that? Can you describe it?’
The scarred revenant shook her outsized head with such force that it wobbled on its little spindle of a neck. I downed my replenished drink which had a superior burn to the last one. What the hell was ol’ Luce was up to? Clients changing their tune was one thing, but breaking out the good booze for the lowly help meant a whole new level of messed up in my experience.
What was really bothering me though, was that while ghosts did occasionally haunt people, they never did it en masse – not unless…
I slammed my glass down, eliciting the desired wince from my hostess.
‘Let’s cut the crap, shall we,’ I said. ‘Just tell me where you’ve buried the bodies.’

It was drizzling that Tuesday, a sullen, persistent skin-soaker that matched the mood of the funeral taking place in Liberton Kirk’s municipal cemetery. Everything was going to plan until Aunt Bella gave an eldritch shriek and threw herself into her husband’s open grave, trying to prise the lid of the coffin open with bloodied nails. The rest of us gawped and looked on, struggling to come to grips with this one and only show of the closest thing to affection that we’d witnessed in their twenty-five year stretch together. You could have called it a loveless marriage on a good day, but so far they’d never had one of those and now it was too late.

She scrabbled at the coffin lid leaving bloody smears on the polished wood, blonde hair escaping from its chignon and sticking to her blotched, mascara-stained face. The too short, too tight skirt she’d been wearing had rucked up in the fall and a hint of bright red underwear was all too visible against the black suit and rich brown of the freshly dug earth: a wound in tender flesh.

Uncle Monty started to scramble down after her but paused when she began writhing around and clutching her stomach, mouth open as though about to vomit. I wondered for an irrational moment if we were going to be treated to an Alien type scene culminating in Bella bursting open on the grave of her barely beloved.

But as always truth was stranger than fiction.

Two unfeasibly attractive young guys I’d never seen before leapt down into the grave and manhandled the lucky widow back out. They managed to prop her up against a gravestone all the while talking to her in low soothing tones while she nodded and sobbed. Looked like the wake wasn’t going to be as dull as I’d thought.

My mother gave me that look, rolling her eyes and twisting her face as she usually did when confronted with such attention-seeking behaviour.

So engrossed were we in this little family drama, that at first the muffled roars of rage from the coffin went unnoticed.

But then there was a loud snapping sound and the lid of the box sprang open…

Although the place had been wiped clean of ghosts, there was one that had not been persuaded to go. One that was so much a part of the fabric of the house and the people who lived here, that it had refused to make that final journey along the Highway of the Dead.

Looking at me warily from the corner of the room, the ghost fiddled with its over-sized granny glasses, the pattern of the wall paper behind it showing clearly through the insubstantial body. The forehead just above the left eye had been stoved in and something fluid glistened inside. This was how it remembered the injury it had received, a vague recollection of an outrage perpetrated on a body it no longer possessed.

I held out my hand and it came.

A wave of loneliness crashed over me casting me adrift on a vast featureless sea under a leaden sky, moorings cut, compass broken. But now there was a lifeline because we had a connection, a conduit through which, with a little luck, the spirit would yield its secrets.

Grudging details came at first, like reluctant suitors on a first date. In life it had been called Anne, but what had rooted it here in death was buried deep down under the surface like a sleeping leviathan. My death sense began to whisper to it, threats and enticements in equal measure, prodding the monster to wake. The two shape-shifters in the room with me whined, afraid of something that would never be the quarry of mere tooth and claw. Death however had no need for such hot-blooded seductions.

Capitulation when it came was as sudden as it was complete. My death sense swarmed eagerly over and around the spirit in spun filaments of blue and silver light. The ghost gained more solidity and in the process the extent of the head-injury was more evident. Previous reluctance forgotten, it, she, now wanted to tell me everything and the trickle of information became a flood.

When the last the frenetic jumble of images slowed, I pieced them into a sequence that started with two boys, the younger with short fair hair, the other a loose limbed teenager. There was now a third child, a girl, all of them playing in a fast flowing stream swollen with recent rain. The rich scent of damp earth carried with it the tease of summer and the children’s laughter hung on the warmed air. A brief moment of suspension and then I was inside the girl, Anne, and into a running commentary: a loop run by this forlorn piece of ghostly consciousness for more years now than it had been alive.

Adam starts saying that Phineas fancied Jenny so we laugh and Phineas tells us we’re being stupid. That just makes it funnier though. Stupid is as stupid does, mum always says. It’s kind of cold in the shallows of the stream and maybe that’s why mum has told us not to play here, but my big brothers are here so it’ll be okay.

Phin lifts a big rock and shouts to us to come over and see what he’s found underneath. I think he’s playing a joke on us for laughing at him because he can be mean like that sometimes. But then Adam shouts to me to come see. I turn too quick and put my foot down hard on a stone that moves when I stand on it. I lose my balance and fall face down into the river bed, smacking my head hard and everything goes black. Then it’s weird because I’m above my body, looking at it face down in the water. There’s a growing pool of red around my head and I think it must be blood, but how could it be, there’s just so much of it? I watch the red bits spread in the water and shout at my brothers as they pull me onto the bank. They look so funny with their mouths flapping trying to pick me up and Phineas even blows air from his mouth into mine when they get me onto the bank. Yuck, why are boys so gross? I really hope Amanda Strathmartin didn’t see that because she’d blab to the whole school about how I was snogging my brother and then I’d have to go to a new school and it would all be just be stupid.

But then some men with stretchers come and take me away, well not me, just my body, but can’t be right, ‘cos I’m here, amn’t I? Anyway, I’d better stay by the river and wait for mum to come get me because I don’t know if I can move. It’s so cold out here and now I don’t know how long I’ve been waiting. Now it’s dark and I start to cry ‘cos mum’s not come for me. She must be really angry with me this time, because she’s never not come before. After a while though I get the hang of things and find that if I really try, I can move. It takes ages though and it’s quite hard to do, so as I head off in the direction of our house I have plenty time to grump about why they’ve just left me behind.

I finally make it back to the house in a total strop and all I want to do is find mum. But the door is open and the house is empty and that’s never happened before – not that I remember anyway. Where have they all gone?

Now it’s all changed and somehow I’m floating above my own body. I must be in hospital ‘cos people in white coats are shouting and putting metal things on my bare, naked chest with electricity coming out. Either that or I’m in the loony bin. Amanda Strathmartin would really love this. I think about this for so long I start to feel funny. I can see mum and dad just outside, dad being held back by more people in white coats. What does he think he’s doing? Maybe I’m dreaming or something, maybe that’s it and it’s all okay. I try to call to mum and dad, but either they can’t hear or my voice has packed up. Dad’s face is all red and mum looks like she’s been crying. I float near the ceiling and next thing, hear this man with a stupid pointy beard say: “She was dead on arrival, it’s no use. Simon, better get someone to tell the parents.”

They can’t mean me can they? What is dead anyway? How can I be dead if I can still think things and see and hear stuff? But everything changes again and now I’m back at the house and it really does look as though someone has died because dad has his black suit on and the boys have their hair brushed in daft side partings which makes me laugh because I know how much they hate that. Today, though they don’t seem to mind that much. Dad’s face is all screwed up and he smells of that stuff adults drink that makes them act all silly and embarrassing.

“What is it dad?” I say and touch him on the arm but he doesn’t hear me. I find mum in the kitchen crying and she won’t pay attention to me either. What’s wrong with everyone? Are they playing a joke to teach me a lesson about being in the stream? But the boys were doing it too, so how is that fair?

But then I have a thought which makes me think that maybe I have gone loop the loop, like Jackie MacLean’s mum when her husband ran off with the baby-sitter: they’re not ignoring me on purpose, I’m dead and this is my funeral. It must be because I don’t have a body and now I don’t have a mum, dad and two stinky brothers anymore. Did I do something wrong? I shouldn’t have played where mum told me not to, but I wasn’t bad enough for this, was I? Maybe if I say I’m sorry, it’ll come all right again. I’m a bit worried about mum and dad to be honest, hope they’re going to be okay because they look awful upset…

But that night something had made me opt for Salisbury Crags, Arthur Seat’s idiot offspring, alone but for the wind tangling my hair and the scent of damp earth. Something niggled at the back of my mind and then fled, giggling, before I could catch it.

I had reached the Radical Road, the pathway that curved around the Crags like an old scar carved out of reptilian skin. My way up to the top was lit by the mauve phosphorescence of corpse candles, behind and below me lay the rust coloured miasma of city lights, like old blood on a corpse long dead.

As I climbed, a breeze ruffled over my skin, carrying with it the scent of spring and the promise of another sullen east coast Edinburgh summer. My menagerie had gone on ahead and was even now sending back images of our prey: a biker gang, lured here by the siren song of strong drugs leavened with S and M action but who were destined for so much more before the night was out.

I stopped for a moment all the better to savour what I had been sent; the weight of the gang’s murderous past and present as plain to my little dark-adapted eyes as Jacob Marley’s chains, each link a misdeed that could not be undone, an outrage that could not be forgiven. The huge and bloated elementals that had attached themselves to each and every gang member were testimony to that.

Against the darkness, the dim glamour of their crimes signalled their presence to me and mine like a beacon. But tonight there was something else hunting in the Park of the Holy Rood, something infinitely worse than a dozen Hell’s Angels painting the city blood red.

Something worse, even, than me.

The corpse-candles were still buzzing around my head, intent on leading me to my death over the Crags and exposing my position to whatever was out there. The wind turned chill, reminding me that I still had my own monsters to find and revenge to wreak.

After all, as my old mother might have said if I’d ever met her: “Do unto others before they do unto you.”

A morning mist hung low over frost slimed grass. Branches of trees pierced the grey gloom like the petrified carcasses of unnameable beasts.

This was the Meadows, slap bang in the middle of a city of half a million souls that now felt as distant as the stars: an island of live greenery in a desiccated urban wasteland. Or so it must have seemed to the horned creature that had padded this way earlier on taloned feet, the old presences stirred by its passage.

My quarry was near.

In the bad old days the Meadows had been submerged under a body of water that stretched from Hope Park Terrace to Brougham Street, contaminated by raw sewage and worse. When the water had been drained it took the human waste with it, but the spiritual effluent remained, keeping me in a job and the city in fear.

I almost walked into the vast trunk of an old elm and cursed my clumsiness aloud drawing the attention of another predator out on the prowl this fine Sunday morning. A low, throaty laugh, the caress of light breath on the back of my neck and I knew I had much more to worry about than the minor demon I’d been hunting.

The Ice Cream Man drove along Constitution Street, the strains of Greensleeves trailing a sweet discord in his wake. It was two in the morning and raining hard, but the Ice Cream Man had no need for lights and window-wipers. Truth to tell they disturbed his concentration and that was Bad For Business.

A muffled sob from the back of the van told him that they weren’t all dead yet. Never mind, they’d soon wish they were. The hunger was on him tonight, an appetite that was getting harder to satisfy. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure it was all worth it. In those darker moods that seemed to take him more and more these days, all he wanted was to burn the world down and him with it.

But not tonight, not yet.

A police squad car passed by, the occupants blind and deaf to the ice cream van’s siren song – unlike the unfortunates he’d caught and stacked in the back. It was too easy really and the boredom made him cruel. Take last night for instance…

He smiled to himself and began to whistle, the world beyond the windscreen a smeared blur of light and shadow. Another sob from the back but he was oblivious, lost in the downward spiral of his own thoughts.

But the instant she woke and came to the window, face a pale oval, smooth and perfect as an egg, he was roused from his reverie.

“Come on down Cathy,” he intoned through the loudspeaker. “I’ve got your favourite. Just pop some slippers on sweetheart. I’ve got a special surprise for you in the back. Best get it while it’s cold though.”

There was something about the three blonde, black-eyed women that was not quite right. At least that was Colin’s opinion as he finished one pint and considered starting another. His thoughts turned as they always did to his bitch ex Jackie, who was giving him grief and not letting him see the wee man until he paid what she said he owed. Fat chance of that when he’d just lost his job in the off-licence where he had worked for ten years. Who could have predicted offies in Scotland would ever go out of business? You had to get through the cold, smothering dark of the winter months somehow and it had long been a family tradition that a vast quantity of booze was just the way to do it.
He decided on a another pint and whisky chaser and lumbered to the bar to get them in. The Bingo Wings was a run-down sort of place, but you could sit in the gloom and nurse drink and grievances in equal measure with no interference from anyone who knew what was good for them.
So the hot glances thrown his way from the blond bints, weren’t really what he’d come to expect from his inner sanctum, least of all on a blustery Tuesday afternoon. No, talent-spotting wasn’t the usual pastime in the Bingo Wings and there were other more likely venues for that sort of nonsense. This was where silent, angry men sat and drank themselves into a well earned oblivion before picking a fight outside to round the evening off.
Christ they were fit though: lush, full figured and from the long legs, not much shy of his six feet frame. He thought maybe they’d been to a fancy dress party because they were all dressed in white see-through dress things that rode right up when they sat down on the bar stools, so you could pretty much see everything. Little tarts.
The nearest one turned her head to look at him, a sinuous, twisting motion accompanied by a fall of arctic-blond hair that was so long she could have sat on it. Well, if the little slag played her cards right, she’d be sitting on something else before the end of the night.
“Are you sisters then?” he said controlling the slurring with a mighty effort.
The other two turned to stare at him with that same serpentine motion and three pairs of black eyes fixed on his face as though he was the most fascinating creature in the world. Probably couldn’t believe their luck.
They must have been sisters because their features were almost identical. There was also a sharpness about the nose and cheek-bones that he hadn’t noticed at first, but they were still stunners, no doubt about it.
“In a way,” the nearest one answered in a soft voice.
She was definitely up for it. Wait until Jackie found out that he still had the old one, two magic.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Eh, Colin. Colin McQuarrie. Yours?” he asked, finally remembering the finer points of leg-over etiquette.
“Margo. And this is Morgan and Marjorie.”
The blond in the middle, Morgan, slithered off her stool and came to stand next to him. Christ, maybe he’d be in a four-way before the night was out if he minded his p’s and q’s. He hurriedly calculated just how much he’d had to drink because it really wouldn’t do to disappoint the ladies. Not if the abuse Jackie had regularly showered him with was anything to go by.
Morgan put a hand on his arm and was so close he could smell her: an intoxicating scent that brought with it the green promise of spring woods. He was just about to press his mouth to hers and maybe even give her a bit of tongue, when she ruined the moment by speaking. That was women for you.
“Did you know you have an elemental attached to you?”
“An elephant? Are you pissed hen?”
The third blond, Marjorie had joined them and stood on his other side. He felt hemmed in for some reason and started to wonder where Rab the barman was; quelling a sudden surge of adrenalin as though some part of his brain was telling him to make a run for it. Why would he run from three lassies?
“An elemental,”
“It’s a lower form of spirit-”
“That attaches itself to people who have done bad things in their lives. It feeds off the energy that creates-”
“And for every bad deed, the elemental gets bigger-”
“And bigger and-”
“Yours is the size of this room. And it’s still growing. You must have been a very naughty boy Colin.”
He’d lost track of who was saying what but it didn’t matter because it melded into a seamless whole as though the conversation was taking place inside his own head. The three hadn’t taken their eyes off him, tracking his progress like a deer or some other prey that didn’t have a hope in hell. Being hopeless had never felt so good.
“You know those angry, frustrated feelings you get where you want to burn the world and everybody in it?”
He was pretty sure that was Marjorie who was stroking his arm, snaking a trail up to the back of his neck. He nodded, a heroic effort in what was turning into an epic afternoon.
“That’s from the elemental. Like waste products if you see what I mean. You’ll have noticed how it’s getting worse no doubt? That’s the elemental getting stronger. Soon it’ll be powerful enough to…extinguish you. Your essence as it were. Oh, don’t worry, silly billy: it won’t kill you. Isn’t that something?” Margo smiled. Was it just his imagination, or were her teeth more prominent than they had been a moment ago?
He felt dizzy as though the women had slipped him something in his drink. As long as they stayed with him, he wasn’t sure he cared.
“Can’t I get rid of it? I mean, couldn’t you help me?” he said, a little boy pleading not to be sent to bed. He didn’t question the truth of what he was being told: it was as if he’d always known. Ever since that hit and run that he’d been responsible for as a teenager nothing had gone right for him.
“Ah, now. We were just getting to that,” said Morgan tapping him on the nose. “But first there’s something you need to do for us.”

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Who am I?

Well that's a good question and on bad days I'm not sure I know the answer.

My name though is Rose Garnett and I hunt down among the dead men in Edinburgh's necropolis. These story fragments are jagged little pills from my own personal stash; free, gratis and for nothing. For those of a more delicate disposition, there's always the Dead Central Soundtrack to help the medicine go down.

And to the select few wise enough to know nothing is for free, these little peep holes will reveal what's really waiting on the other side. Who knows, if you're very unlucky it may even be me...